Two Pike boards review plans for new town

‘Highland Village’ to have over 5000 homes

By TOM KANE

BLOOMING GROVE, PA - Most towns develop gradually as people migrate and settle.

But a developer from Philadelphia wants to build a new town in Lehman Township called “Highland Village,” with 5,318 dwelling units that will draw an estimated 1,013 school children. The new town would be constructed on 2,500 acres, and would have two community centers, a golf course and a group of retail stores.

The development, which is planned as a gated community, is on the grounds adjacent to the Mountain Laurel Performing Arts Center (MLPAC), which was laboring under heavy debt until this project bailed them out.

The Pike County Planning Commission Board and the Pike County Conservation District Board, whose task it is to comment on the project’s master plan and ask questions in the presence of several representatives of the company, met on September 6.

“This was the first time these two boards met on a project of this magnitude,” said Sally Corrigan, Director of the Pike County Planning Department.

Corrigan and Susan Beecher, director of the conservation district, will act as advisors to Lehman Township, where the project would be approved and built.

“It proved to be a very valuable meeting. The board members felt that the developers were receptive to our comments and will address them,” Corrigan said.

Tamiment Development Group (TDG), which is related to the company that owns the Tamiment Resort in Bushkill, a large resort with a hotel and numerous homes, is the developer of Highland Village.

The project would be constructed in seven phases, starting in 2008 and ending in 2021. Over 1,700 acres will be “disturbed” during construction, which amounts to about 71 percent of the land.

“They are saying that the development would be 50-percent open space, but when you consider that 1,700 acres or 71 percent would be disturbed, something doesn’t jive,” Corrigan said. She said that the developers define “open space” in a unique way. “I think they are making a distinction between natural open space, like fields, and constructed open space, like a golf course,” she said.

Corrigan and Beecher frequently asked the developers for more details to appreciate the project’s breadth and the effect it will have on the environment and the rest of the county.

“The people whom I have dealt with on the regulatory side in Pike County are the best I have experienced in the state,” said Richard Amquist, vice president of the Wolfington Company of Philadelphia, the parent company of TDG. “They may not be giving us the best message that we want to hear, but they are telling us clearly what they want. This will make our design better in the long run.”

The developers, who met weekly with the township in August, will continue a series of meeting during the coming months before permits will be issued, Corrigan said.